Deep Purple (27 page)

CHAPTER 36

T
aro followed as Ling led him to the place where the white woman was kept—through a tunneled maze and into another stope guarded by an iron-scrolled gate. He had to bend his tall frame almost double to enter the low, timbered doorway.

“
I took the precaution of removing the woman from easy accessibility to the men,” Ling explained, as he entered into another low room—this one richly draped with black velvet curtains embroidered with whorls of gold design. There was a gold enameled table topped by an exquisite porcelain vase containing an artful arrangement of dried dandelions. A delicate rice-paper screen partially concealed a bed covered in black velvet matching the drapes.

“
You see, Shima-san,” Ling Chuey said, moving now to the bed, “I did not wish for the woman to give up the only bargaining power a female possesses.”

Half propped on tufted cushions in gold silk lay the woma
n, one arm stretched out, the lax hand holding a pipestem whose flame had long before burned out. Taro’s gaze locked on the ravaged face. A pallor had settled over its skeletal contours. The lips, dry and cracked, moved softly, inanely, so that spittle ran from the comer of the mouth. The irises were faded, lifeless half-moons. And the hair—it was matted with filth.

Taro
’s sensibilities were revolted by the stench and sight of the thing on the bed, and he wondered that he had chanced the Lotus Land on the pathetic creature.

His burro's hooves wrapped in cloth to obscure the trail. Taro began the arduous journey home. Before him he cradled the round-eyed woman, Rose—a name that did not befit her, for she possessed the wild loveliness of the sacred lotus. Or, at least, at one time she had.

A scant burden she was for the burro and the man, her flesh wasted away by the seemingly harmless poppy. Indeed, her pale skin, made waxy now by the effects of the opium, resembled the lotus. The shrunken flesh wa
s pulled tightly across her bones. The cracked and split lips concealed the once haunting beauty. But there still remained a semblance, an aura, of the vibrant good looks that had set her apart from all other women.

He halted twice during the night
’s trip to trickle water into the slack mouth. More often than not the water ran back out the comers, but he was persistent, and when the few drops had been swallowed, he resumed his journey.

The sun
’s first tenuous shafts brought Taro into the canyon of his Lotus Land Mine and illuminated his home, a plank-and-log structure clinging like an eagle’s nest to the steep side of a juniper-stubbled reddish-brown mountain. The burro, a jenny, took its two passengers easily along the narrow pebble-strewn path that twisted upward over precarious ridges to the small house.

Upon arrival, without resting, he set about restoring the woman
’s fragile health. A soup,
miso-taki
, made from the vegetables he cultivated in the small patch like garden—chickpeas, ginger root, and onions were boiled along with vinegar, beer, and soy sauce in a black cast-iron kettle over the native stone fireplace.

Behind the cabin he constructed a rock domelike cave, no higher than three or four feet. It resembled the sweathouse the native Americans, the
Indians, used for purifying the body, which was what he intended—to purify the woman’s body of the drugs over the long days and equally long nights that were to come.

Throughout the morning the man heated stones and toted them to the dome in large ore buc
kets suspended from a pole he yoked over his broad shoulders. By noon he had his bathhouse ready. He went to the woman, who lay unconscious on the straw-woven mat in a darkened corner of the room. His fingers began to work at the fastenings of the sweat- and vomit-stained clothing. First the myriad buttons of the high-necked blouse that followed the smooth line of the woman’s backbone, then the heavy, wrinkled skirt and underskirt, the long corset and attaching wire-frame bustle. Lastly the Cromwell shoes, the ribbed cashmere stockings, and the camisole.

He sat back on his knees with a grunt. Not even the Japanese woman
’s kimono, which took two people and forty-five minutes to don, entailed so many needless garments. The woman's almost lifeless body lay exposed to his gaze, but he neither noted the ribs and pelvic bones made prominent by lack of nourishment nor the soft, firmly rounded breasts faintly streaked with blue veins. His culture had taught him that for the ritual bath neither sex actually acknowledged the sight of the nude body. The bath ritual was set apart from the sexual desire—it had to be in his land of little space and privacy.

He easily lifted the woman and carried her to the sweathouse. For a moment he hovered over her as the dry heat envelop
ed the two of them. For a moment, despite the thousand years of assimilated culture, he let his gaze move over the woman in something that was other than impersonal . . . not necessarily a gaze of sexual assessment but one of intrigue.

He was intrigued by everything about her
—the coloring of the tawny-gold hair, the peach-lustered glow of the skin that lay just below the waxy surface, the shape—so obviously feminine in spite of the fact that she was taller, with longer legs, than his countrywomen. Just for a moment he willed her lids to open—to see there the green-eyed gaze. The lashes fluttered, then fell motionlessly on the high sweep of the cheekbones. He moved away to hunch outside the sweathouse.

Nearly half an hour passed before he
judged it time to remove the woman. Wrapping her in a woolly blanket, he carried her back to the house. But he was not yet finished with her. With a cool rag he sponged off the perspiration that beaded her skin, and for the first time she made a noise, a half-moan, half-whimper. He continued despite the moans that, had they carried more strength, would have been protests. He let her sleep then, exhausted as she was from such little administrations to her body.

Later that afternoon, when she stirred, he bega
n to patiently spoon the
miso-taki
into her mouth. After several spoonsful passed her throat, he was rewarded by seeing her irises. Yet he was not lulled into relief. Too often he had seen the signs of an addict, and the path to recovery was not so easily traveled. The eyes had the dull cast to them so that the irises were more a flat pewter than the deep meadow green . . . which alone told him so much.

He let the woman rest while he attended to the chores that had accumulated in his absence. But within the
hour, before the evening’s darkness had even covered the deep gulch below, he took up his task of restoring the woman’s health . . . a warm bath administered by hot towels, followed by a vigorous massage that took in handfuls of muscles running from fingertips to toes. He used the shiatsu finger-pressure method that was an art in the old land.

When he concluded, the woman collapsed like a doll that had had the stuffing removed. Barely audible grunts and whooshes and groans emitted from her, and a slight sm
ile crossed his generous mouth.

For the day he was finished, and he retired to the meticulous washing of his own body
—as golden-hued as the woman’s and incredibly muscled by the years of working with the pick and ax. That night, as in the nights that followed, he placed his own tatami floor mat next to hers so that instantly he was there when she began to mumble or moan.

And moan she did over the days that came and went as slowly as the shadows across a sundial, days and nights punctuated by the woman
’s belligerent shrieks and agonizing screams. He neglected his work at the mine, his garden, everything but his determination to save the woman.

At times she was lucid, and she would look about her, never speaking, never moving
—only the eyes that had that old-young look in them. After a few minutes, minutes that grew into hours as the days passed, the woman would ask for the opium, softly, persuasively at first. “I must have it, don’t you understand— whoever you are? It makes me feel better, you know.”

Taro would
shake his head, sadly, it must seem to her, and a new tactic would begin. Her hand would slide up to cup one of her breasts suggestively or rub sinuously at her pelvic area in a pathetic attempt at seduction. “If you will get the opium for me,” she would ask in a voice made hoarse by her intermittent screams, “I will give you myself—and no man has had me.”

He saw the sudden uncertainty of her last statement pass across her face, and he repressed a smile. “
I could easily take you without getting the opium for you.” he pointed out.

It had to seem to her he was impervious to her agony
—and her tricks.

And her screeching would begin again. Vile curses and crude, coarse language echoed in the cabin
—-obscenities that she must have picked up at the saloon, for despite her dissolute surroundings, he felt she was unsullied. The nights and days he had trailed her, watching her—guarding her—she had never taken a man to bed that he knew of. And always he would ask of himself that final question, did it matter if she had?

Although her lucid moments were punctuated with salacious phrases, the other times were even worse. Taro was forced to straddle her and pin her arms to the plank floor as she tossed and bucked, clawing at her own skin in her torment. If he had to leave th
e cabin for any length of time, he bound her hands and feet with rawhide so that she would not injure herself. If she was awake while he tied her up, she shot volley after volley of bawdy oaths at him, which he ignored, as he did the furious glares.

One mo
rning early, before the sunlight had barely dappled the floor, he was gifted with the first genuine smile. The woman looked at him, studying him as he lay near her.

“
Yes?” he asked, turning his narrow-lidded gaze on her.

“
Why have you done this—why have you cared for me?” she asked in a voice that was no stronger than the spring breeze outside.

“
I would not see something of beauty die,” he replied simply.

CHAPTER 37

A
gainst the harsh light that invaded the room each day the man’s slender figure moved about like some ghostly presence. A benevolent one, though, Jessie thought, as she tried to separate reality from the nightmares. For in the fog of serpents and rodents and, of course, the incredible pain, there was the man . . . and his hands. In all that time of drifting and sliding and writhing she subconsciously had wanted only the relief of the opium, and if not that, then the man's hands.

She covertly watched him now from beneath the veil of her lashes as he moved quietly about the room, and
she realized his slender physique was deceptive. Below the three-quarter-length sleeves of the black ceremonial tea robe he wore, his forearms rippled with sinewy muscles, and she remembered the strength in his hands. The shoulders were broad, the chest deep. She smiled, thinking how the description better fit a stallion, and he said, “Your smile lightens my home.”

So, he had known all along that she was awake, watching him. She blushed, bringing the first glint of color to the long-deprived skin. As if sen
sing her embarrassment, he turned back to the hot liquid he poured in china cups. “Where am I?” she asked him.

He crossed the room, carrying the two cups on a tray. Only then, as he sat before her, legs crossed, did she realize the man was the Oriental who had so often played fan-tan at her table. “
In my house,” he replied as he passed her one of the cups. “Have you enough strength to drink on your own now?”

The cup, beautifully fired with tints of flat green and black, had no handle, and Jessie held it in both hands as she struggled to support herself on one elbow. She had not realized how weak she was. Past the ma
n, through the open wooden shutters, she could see the scattered juniper and scrub oaks and, beyond, tips of distant mountain peaks. “But where is your house? And exactly who are you?”

Taro smiled. “
I can see you are better. Drink your tea, and I will answer all your questions.”

She raised a questioning brow. “
All of my questions?”

“
Whatever you wish to know.” He set the cup aside, and she was momentarily diverted by the grace of his movement—-smooth, fluid, liquid—so out of character with the rough, clumsy men who frequented the gambling saloons.

“
I have brought you to my house, which is in the Mule Mountains south of Tombstone, because you were very ill.”

“
From the opium,” she stated more than asked, wondering about Dan—if he knew what had happened to her. But then in his own way he had become just as addicted to it, so that he cared for little else. He had only controlled his intake better.

“
Now drink your tea,” Taro told her, “unless you have any more questions.”

She had many, but she was afraid she knew
the answers. He alone had to have undressed her—and seen her nudity. She blushed again, crimson spreading across her face to the roots of her hairline.

“
I did not take unfair advantage of you,” the man across from her stated quietly. “You are as you were.”

“
Not quite,” she said sadly, her gaze falling on her hands that clutched the cup like bird’s claws. “Perhaps you should have let me die. I wanted to.”

“
And you will want to again, many times before your karma dictates your wish, but you won’t—so you must make the best of living until that time comes.”

She looked up into the granite-smooth face with the undecipherable gaze. "That sounds pretty much like a speech.”

He smiled, showing the teeth that were whiter than pearls. “I have labored long for your life. Therefore you cannot so lightly regard it, for it belongs to me now. You must excuse my excess of words. But I . . .”

She belonged to him? What a quaint thought . . . and a disconcerting one! “
Who are you?” she murmured.

“
I am Taro Shima, from the southern prefecture of Kumamoto, Japan.”

“
Then you aren’t Chinese? But who are you? I mean, it is so odd to find a person like you—here—in the middle of nowhere.”

“
You still have not drunk your tea," he reminded her.

The tea was excellent, much better-tasting, sh
e decided, than the sarsaparilla-root tea Nellie Cashman made. Taro Shima began to talk to her. Quietly he told her how he had come to the United States four years earlier at seventeen. “The steamship that brought me from Japan was unable to dock in Hawaii because of a plague raging the islands,” he explained, “so the steamship was forced to transport myself and the other ninety-two Japanese laborers to San Francisco. When it arrived, thirty-seven of the laborers were dead—from ill treatment.”

He spoke of w
orking on the railroad as a gandy dancer and rail layer to support himself; of keeping his money until he had enough to buy the land the Lotus Land claim sat on. The softly spoken words, the mesmeric gaze of the those slanted eyes, soon lulled her into a deep sleep unmarred, at first, by the hellish dreams of dragons and serpents and crackling flames.

When next she awoke, she found the man was kneeling over her. A soft darkness enveloped the two of them. His long fingers pressed in concentric circles at her
temples. “What are you doing?” she whispered in a nervous croak.

“
You were having unpleasant dreams. Your hands beat at your head. The headache—it is gone now?’’

She remembered now the pain that had throbbed in her head like a sledgehammer, threatening su
rely to crack open her skull. But now beneath the gentle pressure of the man's fingers the intense pain had miraculously subsided. “Yes.” She sighed. “The headache is gone. Taro.”

Her lashes fluttered closed, her mind drifting into the netherworld once mor
e with the nebulous thought that she should be afraid, alone with the man. But somehow, with his fingers massaging her temples, her mind, it did not matter. Nothing mattered.